PERPETRATOR - Mark Reviews Movies

Perpetrator, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 24, 2023

Filled with a hodgepodge of ideas, Perpetrator lacks one vital thing: a sense of purpose. Actually, it's lacking a few things, because writer/director Jennifer Reeder's movie is missing narrative purpose, thematic purpose, and any feeling that its characters exist with a sense of purpose. The movie's a mess, in plainer words, and, worse, one that clearly believes it has something unique and important to say.

The story, such as it is, revolves around Jonny (Kiah McKirnan), an allegedly 17-year-old girl who, like all of the supposed teenagers in this movie, looks as if she should be a teacher at her school instead of a student. Whether the age-inappropriate casting here is part of the jokey tone of the movie is unclear, but then again, the tone of the whole thing itself is unclear, since the story opens with a "teenage" girl being abducted, bound to a gurney, and drained of her blood by a masked stalker.

There are multiple elements of a horror story in Reeder's screenplay, which involves the kidnapping of several teen girls, the perpetrator of those crimes on the loose and carrying on his crimes without hindrance, a mysterious ritual that transforms young women into empathetic pseudo-vampires, and lots of real and fake blood. The real stuff comes from various parts of the bodies of assorted women, while also serving as a kind of portal to a veritable sea of blood, and the fake variety arrives during a shooter drill at school.

The principal (played by Christopher Lowell) puts on a mask, roams the halls and classrooms, and sprays students with a squirt gun full of red dye. It's played as a joke, since the students are worried their parents will be disappointed in and ground them for failing the test, and the fact that scene has no point, beyond being a gag and to feel like paying lip service to some real-world concerns, should give one a sense of how empty such potentially heavy material comes across here.

Anyway, Jonny is being barely raised by a single father, while trying to make cash by robbing prescription drugs and other valuables from houses. She just wants to get out of this place, and she gets the chance when her dad ships her off to live with her great-aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone). She's a tough-minded plot device of a character, existing to celebrate Jonny's 18th birthday with a cake made out of menstrual blood and inform her niece that she's now part of an exclusive coven of witch-like entities. Their special power is the ability to telepathically read minds and "feel all the feelings"—which, yes, is an actual line of dialogue here at least twice.

Obviously, this is a metaphor for something, so it doesn't necessarily merit any kind of straightforward, consistent, or logical explanation. Well, it wouldn't, except that there's still the matter of the vaguely established and developed plot driving this narrative. While hanging out at school and stealing from her classmates and having formed relationships with characters who just appear out of nowhere, Jonny starts feeling all the feelings being felt by the abducted teenage girls. She makes it her mission to find them, discover the identity of the torturing kidnapper, and put a stop to him.

There are few suspects, from a womanizing popular boy named Kirk (Sasha Kuznetsov) to a cop who teaches the high school girls a very unhelpful form of self-defense, but Reeder either intentionally or accidentally gives away the mystery with one character's introductory scene. Again, it's difficult to determine if the obvious nature of the mystery is part of whatever point the filmmaker wants to make or just incompetence. The fact that the kidnapper's identity isn't explicitly exposed but is played as a major revelation at the end of the third act makes one pretty confident that the decision is the second option.

Until all of that takes over around the midpoint of the story, Reeder's narrative is devoted to Jonny experiencing her new powers, while many points about the experiences of high schoolers and especially women play out in the background. None of them are particularly revelatory or pointed, and the constantly shifting tone and method of the movie, which veers between attempts at supernatural surrealism and dread-filled thriller and satirical comedy, just confounds the goals of Perpetrator even more. That is, of course, assuming there is a point to this loaded but entirely hollow exercise.

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